Police Bus Hits Land Mine in Russia

Published 8:00 pm, Wednesday, June 18, 2003

A police bus hit a remote-controlled land mine in southern Russia on Thursday, killing three officers and wounding at least six others, officials said.

The explosion occurred in the Prigorodny district of North Ossetia near the border with Ingushetia, said Oleg Vershinin, spokesman for the Federal Security Service in Vladikavkaz.

Russia's state-controlled Rossiya television showed footage of a red bus, its front end mangled and all the windows shattered. It stood in a grassy field just off the edge of an unpaved road.

The mine was near a checkpoint of troops from the Interior Ministry, Russia's main law enforcement agency, Vershinin said.

The officers were en route to Magas, the Ingush capital, when their bus struck the mine, said Yuri Krivopusk, spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry in North Ossetia. He put the number of injured at six.

The Interior Ministry said three of the injured were in serious condition.

Prigorodny has been a flashpoint of tensions between the Ossetian and Ingush ethnic groups. War broke out between them in 1992, killing hundreds and leading to the expulsion of some 75,000 ethnic Ingush from the region. Efforts to allow the return of Ingush refugees have met with sometimes violent resistance.

The region also has been troubled by spillover violence from Chechnya, where Russian forces have been fighting rebels for much of the last decade. The outnumbered and outgunned rebels frequently use land mines as a major part of their arsenal.

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Russia's Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky was quoted as telling the ITAR-Tass news agency that "most likely there is no connection with events in Chechnya." He cautioned, however, that an investigation was still under way.